Site Mobile Navigation

The Running of the Tomatoes

ON Wednesday, as on the last Wednesday of August every year, the village square of Bunol turned red in a giant food fight with ripe tomatoes. Upwards of 20,000 people pelted one another for an hour -- and, before and after, bought food and drinks and acted like tourists.

The sticky frenzy is called La Tomatina. It has attracted television cameras from abroad and listings on the Internet. A restaurant named Tomatina opened last year in St. Helena, Calif., decorated with a photo of the fight and a door painted to look like it was just splattered with a tomato.

This is no small feat for Bunol, a working-class town of 9,300 people formerly renowned for its cement factory. The town, in fact, formerly had nothing to do with tomatoes. It still does not grow them or process them, and its bars don't even serve Bloody Marys.

But in Spain's crowded field of town fiestas, that's no matter. Spain has its old festivals -- Pamplona's running of the bulls is the best known -- and now its new ones, the throngs attracted by cute themes that have no roots to speak of in local tradition or culture.

Pamplona was running bulls through town back in the 16th century. In Valencia, 24 miles from Bunol in eastern Spain, the ''fallas'' festival is traced to medieval carpenters who burned excess wood shavings on March 19 to honor their patron saint, St. Joseph. It has grown to become a spectacular blaze of papier-mache figures on a single night, with hundreds of thousands of onlookers.

In gaining recognition for its fiesta, Bunol had competition not just from these two, but from many towns whose fiestas tapped centuries of tradition. And Bunol had little of its own.

The town banned bullfights in the 1930's, considering them to be cruel. But a decade later, a tomato fight broke out on the town square during a local procession. There are varying explanations of why the tomatoes started flying, but all agree that more tomatoes were thrown the following year, and the fiesta took seed.

It remained mainly a local event until 1983, when Spanish national television showed up. Tomato T-shirt sales followed soon after, and this year one villager started selling waterproof disposable cameras for $10 to tourists about to enter the fray.

Joining in the action last week were travelers from San Francisco, Washington, London and Tokyo who said that making tomato sauce in public was their principal reason for visiting Spain.

Museums. Big Deal.

A booming firework signaled the start, and six large trucks filled with 137 tons of pear-shaped tomatoes entered the town square in a staggered procession.

''It was like being caught in a blender,'' said Martin Lenick, 33, a chemical engineer from Chicago who first heard about the fight the previous night while enjoying a Bloody Mary in Valencia.

When the exuberant crowd surged to grab tomatoes dumped from the trucks, the sheer force of motion pulled Mr. Lenick out of his $80 handmade leather sandals purchased days earlier in Milan. They were lost in the slush, and he happily fought barefoot.

The bragging rights seem to be irresistible for foreigners. ''Everyone sees museums,'' said Deirdre Goggins, 31, who works at a San Francisco software firm. ''But how many can say, 'When I was in Spain I participated in a tomato fight'?''

After the fight, everyone cleans up the streets and building facades, and many go home for a meal of tomato salad and gazpacho, a less-than-ancient tradition.

Other Spanish villages have also discovered that fiestas need not be historically certified.

In the isolated southern mountain town of Berchules, bar and discotheque owners were fed up with power failures in December that more than once left their New Year's Eve galas in the dark. So the town, population 860, invented a fiesta three years ago to celebrate New Year's Eve in August. This year, foreigners were among the 5,000 people who paid top dollar to uncork champagne, dine, dance and kiss each other at the stroke of midnight.

Government officials say fiestas add variety for tourists who would be visiting Spain anyway for its beaches or art museums. Tourism generated 10 percent of the nation's $582 billion gross domestic product last year and accounted for one out of every eight jobs.

There are no data on the impact of the fiestas, but some towns have estimates. Valencia, Spain's third- largest city, spends about $3 million a year to build its papier-mache ''fallas,'' and in recent years has taken in more than $65 million from the fiesta.

Bunol's main expense is tomatoes, about $14,000 worth this year. All of them, except for those from local gardens that might end up in the gazpacho, are trucked in from the next province.

That is still closer than the original home for tomatoes, which Spanish explorers brought back from Mexico and Peru. Bunol is nestled at the foot of a 15th-century castle. And if someone could locate a local ancestor who sailed with the conquistadors, the problem of the tomato fight fiesta's short pedigree might be solved after all.